scribepub's reviews
497 reviews

The book is a bush tale, a family saga, a romance, and a war epic — simply but powerfully told.
Armidale Express

This is a poignant, anti-war story which pulls no punches, describing the shellshock and depression which was the legacy of many World War I veterans, including the valiant nurses.
Courier Mail

Heard made me forget that Tag was a novel. With all its mayhem, madness, appalling carnage and war time love, I felt like I was in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front with Tag, Tiger, Bucket and Golly. Heard brings the reader to a deeper level of understanding of the exceptional work our diggers did under a great deal of stress, both physically and emotionally.
Gordon Trail, Peacekeepers Association

The Woman Who Fooled the World isn’t just a detonating exposé, but a forensically researched, compulsively readable and frequently staggering behind-the-scenes account of an unravelling on an operative scale. It’ll also restore your faith in journalism’s ability to uncover the truth and expose it to light.
Benjamin Law, author of Gaysia and The Family Law

Meticulously researched and elegantly composed, The Woman Who Fooled The World is a journalistic detective story for the smart-phone age. Donelly and Toscano not only chart con artist Belle Gibson's rise to global acclaim and her crashing fall, they explore and explain modern society's willingness to believe in anyone, or anything, that offers hope of beating what is perhaps our greatest collective fear: cancer. For me, the book reaches its highest point when we hear from genuine cancer sufferers who believed in Gibson. Their honesty about their fears and uncertain futures counter balances the bullshit of Gibson and her profit-minded enablers. Donelly and Toscano give a master class in old-fashioned investigative journalism and a reminder of its potency and importance.
Richard Baker, Investigative Journalist, The Age

It gives me great pleasure that this story has been told in such a compelling and readable way, as this surely means that it will reach the wide audience it deserves to. Not only does The Woman Who Fooled the World detail the sordid story of a young woman lying her way to fame and fortune, it also savagely exposes the wellness industry that enabled her rise. Although Belle Gibson has now been exposed, this brilliant book reveals how many others were complicit and culpable. I hope they are all thoroughly ashamed, and that this book serves as a powerful reminder, helping to ensure that this sort of deception is never allowed to happen again.
Anthony Warner, The Angry Chef

The Woman Who Fooled the World is a balanced and authoritative account of Gibson's career … essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of how so many people could have fallen for her pernicious lies.
Simon Caterson, Irish Independent

The book’s main lesson is how easy it is, in this age of social-media-driven “fake news”, to dupe the public. It’s also an excoriating attack on the charlatanism of “wellness warriors”.
The Mail on Sunday

The Woman Who Fooled the World bracingly retells a memorable chapter in the history of human folly.
Sunday Business Post

A salutary tale for our social media times.
The Sunday Times

Couldn't recommend it more. It not only forensically dissects the mind and actions of this modern fraud but cuts to the core of the growing unhealthy abuse of lifestyle and wellness by modern media and social media.
Dr Robert O’Connor, Head of Research at the Irish Cancer Society

Where The Woman Who Fooled The World really excels is in a nuanced depiction of a woman more commonly represented in one-note terminology as an evil liar and a fraud.
Broadly

The Woman Who Fooled the World is a fascinating character study that will appeal to true-crime fans.
Booklist

Thoroughly researched, well written, entirely engrossing journalistic account of a badly executed fraud that took advantage of incredibly vulnerable people in a lot of pain, physically and mentally, and how it all came crumbling down, with plenty of relevant and fascinating segues into history and the cults/culture of healing.
Rennie Sweeney

This fascinating and thoroughly reported tale will have readers casting a gimlet eye on both the wellness industry and social media.
Publishers Weekly

This is a book of unbearable beauty and affliction. It is written with the lucidity of someone who has opened his eyes and refused to shut them again. The book’s power is not only in what it says, but in the silences that it leaves the reader’s conscience to grapple with.
Yuri Herrera

Among the Lost is masterly. Its rhythm and syntax form an unforgettable, multilayered requiem for our battered region.
Valeria Luiselli

It’s a brilliantly composed, dramatic and unflinching evocation of a world riven by endemic violence and extreme feeling, and an astute (if apocalyptic) road trip into the psychology of abuse.
Cameron Woodhead, The Age

A fierce love story … Monge’s narrative plants the reader in this dirty and tumultuous foreign land in a way that is artistically and cleverly shackling, and the resultant piece is an important insight into the horrific realities of people-trafficking in South America … An important read.
Ronan Gerrard, The London Magazine

Emiliano Monge’s concussive new novel is a love story. It’s also a blood-drenched journey through a world where kindness has been obliterated and almost every moral code shredded … its emotional ferocity is astonishing. You feel appalled, compromised, profoundly moved.You wish the US President would read it. Or read, full stop.’
David Hill, Weekend Herald

A timely novel of immigration that is as beautiful as it is horrific. It is a multilayered, emotionally complex artistic triumph.
Rebecca Hussey, Foreword Reviews

A dark vision of life on the border between the inferno and an imagined paradise, this book paints an all too real picture of what people will do for a new life. FOUR STARS
Mitch Mott, Adelaide Advertiser

In a remarkable literary feat, this tale of the dire events of one day illuminates the past, the present, and the future. While many questions remain unanswered at the end, this is a comprehensive drama of the human potential for violence and dreams in a fractured land.
Shoot Viswanathan, Booklist

The language in Among the Lost is both striking and strikingly easy to read … He channels the full spectrum of written expression, and the result hits the trifecta: beautiful, fast-paced, and completely his own.
Lily Meyer, NPR

A cunning and often powerful novel.
Adam Rivett, Weekend Australian

To read Among the Lost is to be trapped in, to borrow another Mongian phrase, a “cage of light” — a Goyaesque picture of the Central American exodus, and the horrors some migrants pass through along the transit routes in Mexico.
The Nation

This is one of the darkest books I have ever read, and one of the most powerful ... an emotionally-wrenching experience and also essential reading for those who want to think deeply about migration and human rights.
Bookriot

Blending a sense of the archetypal with a deeply contemporary story, Among the Lost is an utterly harrowing read that takes numerous artistic and structural risks across its pages ... It’s a grand and unsettling work.
Words Without Borders, ‘The Watchlist: June 2019’

Atmospheric and chilling.
Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall

At Dusk provides the reader with an excellent picture of Seoul now and several decades ago, with a mournful, nostalgic feel pervading the novel … Hwang is a masterful storyteller, and the final third of the book skilfully brings the disparate stories together, with a clever, and surprising, twist to round matters off.
Tony Malone, Tony’s Reading List

At Dusk is a small but powerful novel from one of South Korea’s most esteemed novelists … The questions At Dusk raises are timeless, and perfect for more serious book-group discussions.
Annie Condon, Readings

[A] beautifully observed tale … another superb novel from a writer at the top of his craft.
Pile by the Bed

What elevates this work, is how the gritty psychological exploration of contemporary Korean society is packaged within a taut and compelling mystery regarding how the two disparate narratives might be connected. At Dusk is another short but impactful novel from Hwang Sok-yon.
Booklover Book Reviews

At Dusk is a book steeped in melancholy – for times gone by, for relationships lost or abandoned, for a world that no longer exists. Hwang delves deeply into the psyche of his characters and in doing so tells universal stories of love, ambition and regret … another superb novel from a writer at the top of his craft.
psnews.com.au

A stirring and quietly moving novel … a sharply perceptive account of the struggle to maintain body and soul, roughly speaking, in the decades before Chun dooh-hwan's military coup of 1980.
FIVE STARS
Paddy Kehoe, RTÉ

At Dusk has Hwang’s customary blend of fragility and brutality, of tenderness and raw pain … At Dusk is a journey through memory and through the necessary potential and duty of architecture; through human spaces and urban topographies of existence and non-being. For Korea, this is a novel that should mark a turning point in its sense of identity; for non-Korean readers, it is a blueprint of the critical elenchus we need to undertake before it is tragically far too late for all our local traditions, cultures and individual lives.
Mika Provata–Carline, Bookanista

[A] solid portrait of changing times and society.
M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review

Having been imprisoned for political reasons, Hwang has a restrained, delicate touch, alive to the nuances of memory, the slipperiness of the past, and the difficult choices life forces us to make ... Subtly political, deeply humane, a story about home, loss, and the cost of a country's advancement. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews

Here [Sok-yong] scrutinises the quiet disconnect of contemporary relationships through the life of a successful, sixty–something Seoul architect … A piercing modern tale about all we can never know about our loved ones and ourselves. STARRED REVIEW
Terry Hong, Booklist

Celebrated author Hwang Sok-yong explores the human toll of South Korea’s rapid modernisation ... Through the lens of Seoul’s urban housing and architecture, he traces the development of South Korean modernisation and highlights the extremes to which its citizens are pushed, challenging readers in the process to reexamine if the nation’s transformation can truly be considered successful.
International Examiner

Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk is a perfect slice of Koreana; a touching, somewhat depressive narrative full of nostalgia that shows the underbelly of a nation through the life of characters inhabiting society’s bottom rung.
Gabino Iglesias, NPR

These characters illustrate South Korea’s sharp economic divides and explore what is required to improve one’s lot in life — and whether it’s even possible for more than a very few. It captures so much in under 200 pages: economic inequality; gender, class, and educational divides; and the complex relationships individuals and the culture at large have with their own history.
Rebecca Hussey, Bookriot

Peggy Frew is an amazing writer and Hope Farm is a great novel that captures the pleasures and difficulties of being both a parent and of being a child. The complex story of Silver and Ishtar and their fraught relationship is beautifully written, acutely observed and, best of all, completely absorbing. I could almost feel the crisp Gippsland mornings, hear the birds warbling and smell the stale dope smoke. Hope Farm is elegant, tender and very wise.
Chris Womersley, Award-Winning Author of Cairo and Bereft

[E]legiac, storied … aligns itself with other novels in which children — out of rashness, anger or even ignorance — act out to terrible consequences. As with Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonemen or Leo in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, these decisions are usually compounded by circumstance … Frew does not want to pass judgment though. She understands that the sadness of childhood is to grow up in circumstances over which you have little or no control.
Jessica AU, Sydney Morning Herald

Peggy Frew’s novel, Hope Farm, tells an original tale, drawing into the body of Australian literary fiction, a world between the cracks. Peggy’s voice is contemporary, her observations sharp and sensitive. Hope Farm describes the cycle of loss and damage when there are no boundaries to protect us.
Sofie Laguna, Author of The Eye of the Sheep, 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner

Frew’s deceptively slow-burn tale of a teenage girl — adrift, bewildered, seeking solidity — moves inexorably to its climax, laying bare a certain darkness at the heart of the alternative lifestyle. But it's the tale of a survivor, too.
Luke Davies, Award-Winning Author of Candy

At this point it could be too early to call it, but I’m thinking this could end up on my top 10 books of the year list … Beautifully written, difficult to put down, hard not to feel the ache.
Geelong Advertiser

In its exploration of maternal, sexual, unrequited and platonic relationships, Hope Farm is a finely calibrated study of love, loss and belonging.
Thuy On, Sunday Age

[An] assured exploration of that awkward moment between childhood and the teenage years [as well as a] devastating critique of the treatment of unwed mothers in the ’70s.
Margot Lloyd, Adelaide Advertiser

Frew is a gifted writer, evidenced here by finely balanced observations and atmospheric description … Silver is poised at the beginning of adult understanding and Frew handles the challenge with deftness. Silver’s insight and compassion are juxtaposed with naivety and the idealistic force of her first crushes.
Ed Wright, Weekend Australian

Absorbing ... A beautifully-told story of courage and survival, Hope Farm is about growing up, belonging, and long-kept secrets.
Carys Bray, Author of A Song for Issy Bradley

Reading [Hope Farm] made me feel as though I’d lived it. So darn clever.
Clare Bowditch

Frew’s second novel is an Australian cousin of T.C. Boyle’s Drop City, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, and other novels about the failures of communal living, with additional connections to Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
Kirkus Reviews

Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but Women’s Work dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible ... Stack writes sharp, pointed sentences that flash with dark insight ... ruthlessly self-aware [and] fearless.
Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

Women’s Work hit me where I live, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The discomforting truths Stack reveals about caretaking and labor transcend cultural and national boundaries; this book is relevant to everyone, no matter how or where they live. Stack uses her reporting acumen to illuminate domestic workers' struggles, but also fearlessly reveals the most vulnerable details of her own life in order to make her point. The masterfulness with which she tells these intertwined stories makes this book not just a work of brilliant journalism but a work of art.
Emily Gould, Author of Friendship: A Novel and And the Heart Says Whatever

If Karl Ove Knausgaard himself were a woman and had given birth, he might have written a book a little like Women’s Work. Megan Stack’s mastery of language and attention to detail make magic of the most quotidian aspects of life. But the subject matter here is hardly banal. Stack goes beyond her own experience of motherhood to focus on the Chinese and Indian nannies who helped her raise her children at the expense of their own. She brilliantly dissects the contradictions of motherhood by analyzing how motherly love becomes a commodity in this modern, globalized word.
Barbara Demick, Author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Megan Stack is willing to confront hard questions that so many of us flinch from: the relationships between women and the women we hire to take care of our houses and our children, to do the traditional women’s work that gives “liberated women” the time to do traditional men's work. Women’s Work is a book of vivid characters, engrossing stories, shrewd insights, and uncomfortable reflections.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO of New America, and author of Unfinished Business

Women’s Work is an incredible follow-up to Megan Stack’s celebrated book of war reportage, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar. It is a fierce and furious and darkly funny book about the costs of motherhood: the psychological costs, the costs in time and energy and spirit, and finally the costs imposed on other women, most of them also mothers, who leave their own children so they can take care of ours. I can’t think of a work that speaks more directly to our age of increasing inequality, starting with housework and child care, the oldest inequalities of all.
Keith Gessen, Author of A Terrible Country

A self-critical and heartfelt narrative ... beautifully written, informative, and sometimes harrowing as she recounts the joy, fear, and exhaustion of becoming a mother. What women — and men — can learn from Stack's story is that “women's work”, in all of its complexity and construction, should not be only for women. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus

Megan Stack obliterates the silence that upholds one of our greatest taboos: our universal reliance on domestic labor that women — women of colour especially — are expected to supply freely or cheaply. With journalistic rigor, Stack centres the complicated lives of women who clean our homes and care for our children, but it’s her willingness to shine a light into the dark, typically untouched corners of her own family, privilege, and ambition that makes this book soar.
Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother

Stack writes, unflinchingly, about what it was like for her world to shrink and her life to entwine with the lives of her hired help — who left their own kids behind in order to work in her home ... Stack’s writing is sharp and lovely, especially in the first section of the book as she deftly describes her plunge into new motherhood and year-long journey to find herself again.
Erica Pearson, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection … Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.
Amy Scribner, BookPage

Stack’s engaging style will have women everywhere nodding in recognition. FIVE STARS
Robyn Douglas, Adelaide Advertiser

Stack, who had stints in Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow and Beijing for the Los Angeles Times, is a natural storyteller with an eye for detail ... This is a painfully honest investigation of what kind of compromises women make by hiring other women to do the grunt work ... Stack confronts a reality that many try not to think about: Who are the women who care for my children and clean my house? ... a double-edged indictment: of those, including Stack, who exploit domestic helpers in their desire to remain relevant in work but also of the men who abdicate responsibility ... In an unflinching way, Stack pulls the curtain back on the truths of women’s lives, especially the domestic part: how women make it work.
Debra Bruno, The Washington Post

Stack is admirably honest about her reactions and responses. Her prose is often a joy to read: sharp and full of insight.
Henrietta McKervey, The Irish Times

Shashi Tharoor is the most charming and persuasive writer in India. His new book is a brave and characteristically articulate attempt to save a great and wonderfully elusive religion from the certainties of the fundamentalists and the politicisation of the bigots.
William Dalrymple

[An] important book: it is about the dangers that lie in India’s future as well as the woes and glories of the past.
Financial Times

Tharoor has undoubtedly done an important work that helps people understand key difference between Hinduism and Hindutva.
straight.com

The Hinduism Tharoor proudly asserts and defends is universalist, liberal, and syncretic ... this deeply informative book is a must-read for Americans interested in Hinduism and the world’s largest democracy. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist

A thoughtful celebration of Hinduism as a potentially unifying force.
Kirkus

A profound book on one of the world's oldest and greatest religions.
Hindustan Times

At one point in Orhan Pamuk’s perceptive novel Snow, the protagonist Ka highlights the supreme paradox of religious mobilisation in his part of the world. Defenders of militant Islam draw upon religious vocabularies to justify their politics, without once mentioning God or faith. It is precisely the distinction between politics in the name of religion, and faith, that Shashi Tharoor in this rather charming book on Hinduism and Hindutva seeks to emphasise.<.i>
The Hindu

“Fire and fury” is the mentality of despots everywhere. Miller has terrifyingly captured that condition — bullying, threatening, vengeful, and lethal.
Michael Wolff, Author of Fire and Fury

This book will piss off the powerful, which is why you should read it … With unflinching prose and the rigour of a veteran journalist, Jonathan Miller disrobes Rodrigo Duterte for all to see. Beyond the myths and propaganda of [Duterte’s] supporters, the Filipino politician is here paraded nakedly, with his contradicting good intentions that involve bloody violence, broken promises, and the brazen perpetuation of dynastic patronage politics that continue to dismantle Asia’s oldest free republic … This portrait presents a cautionary tale of the kind of authoritarian rulers that stand to hijack any democracy if we citizens do not participate in protecting it while we still can.
Miguel Syjuco, Author of Ilustrado

Miller's fast-paced, lively narrative helps explain how an electoral insurgency led by a charismatic populist … has put the Philippines on the road to authoritarian rule.
Walden Bello, Former Philippine Congressman (2009-15)

An invaluable portrait … it deftly weaves Duterte’s rise with the country’s history of living through dictatorship and nearly making it across the line where some degree of economic prosperity and political maturity was making a dent on social inequality and impunity — before being rudely and brutally thrown into the mass grave that it has turned into.
Ruben Carranza, Filipino Lawyer

This story jumps out of the pages like a thriller. But it’s all true. [Rodrigo Duterte] makes Trump look tame.
Hamish MacDonald

Jonathan Miller has lifted the lid on a viper’s nest. [Rodrigo Duterte] is a terrifying insight into the abuse of democracy, and how we the people allow justice to die.
Andrew O’Keefe AM, Seven Network

Rodrigo Duterte has been labelled by the US media “the Donald Trump of Asia” … Miller talks to relatives of murdered drug users and, in unsettling detail, tells of children as young as five being caught in the savage crossfire.
Sunday Territorian, Four Stars

This book lays it all out in shocking colour.
The Saturday Paper

Among the most skilled and lyrical correspondents that I know: Miller describes the grim actions of one of the most infernal leaders of the 21st Century. A shocking book — but one that demands to be read.
Jon Snow

Duterte Harry deftly guides readers through this warped political landscape to reveal the vulnerability of a tempestuous leader.
Economist

Jonathan Miller, a correspondent for Channel 4 News, paints a shocking portrait in stark language of the man known as ‘Duterte Harry’ after Clint Eastwood’s uncompromising ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan. The most striking aspect of Miller’s detailed biography, which draws on interviews with Duterte’s family and friends, is how proud many Filipinos are of their maligning and murderous chief executive.
Time Literary Supplement

[Rodrigo Harry] captures the strongman leader in all his contradictions.
Reuters

Jonathan Miller … skilfully weaves in fear, shock and pain, including meeting those on the hit list and those left behind.
Jim Robinson, North and South

[A] deeply reported, vivid foreign correspondent’s account of the man’s rise to power.
John Reed, Financial Times
 
This study of the foul-mouthed ‘gangster’ by a writer who’s lived in the country for yonks is a real eye-opener.
The Sunday Sport

Miller’s is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of Duterte yet, exploring the unique circumstances that moulded the leader’s psyche, his style of leadership and, later in life, his rise to the presidency.
Richard Javad Heydarian, Mekong Review

Miller, a correspondent for Britain’s Channel 4 news, bases his account on extensive reporting, placing the reader up close as Duterte’s manic and macho personality plunges the Philippines into perpetual civil conflict.
Joshua Kurlantzick, Washington Monthly

“Fire and fury” is the mentality of despots everywhere. Miller has terrifyingly captured that condition — bullying, threatening, vengeful, and lethal.
Michael Wolff, Author of Fire and Fury

This book will piss off the powerful, which is why you should read it … With unflinching prose and the rigour of a veteran journalist, Jonathan Miller disrobes Rodrigo Duterte for all to see. Beyond the myths and propaganda of [Duterte’s] supporters, the Filipino politician is here paraded nakedly, with his contradicting good intentions that involve bloody violence, broken promises, and the brazen perpetuation of dynastic patronage politics that continue to dismantle Asia’s oldest free republic … This portrait presents a cautionary tale of the kind of authoritarian rulers that stand to hijack any democracy if we citizens do not participate in protecting it while we still can.
Miguel Syjuco, Author of Ilustrado

Miller's fast-paced, lively narrative helps explain how an electoral insurgency led by a charismatic populist … has put the Philippines on the road to authoritarian rule.
Walden Bello, Former Philippine Congressman (2009-15)

An invaluable portrait … it deftly weaves Duterte’s rise with the country’s history of living through dictatorship and nearly making it across the line where some degree of economic prosperity and political maturity was making a dent on social inequality and impunity — before being rudely and brutally thrown into the mass grave that it has turned into.
Ruben Carranza, Filipino Lawyer

This story jumps out of the pages like a thriller. But it’s all true. Duterte Harry makes Trump look tame.
Hamish Macdonald

Jonathan Miller has lifted the lid on a viper’s nest. Duterte Harry is a terrifying insight into the abuse of democracy, and how we the people allow justice to die.
Andrew O’Keefe AM, Seven Network

Among the most skilled and lyrical correspondents that I know: Miller describes the grim actions of one of the most infernal leaders of the 21st Century. A shocking book — but one that demands to be read.
Jon Snow

Rodrigo Duterte has been labelled by the US media “the Donald Trump of Asia” … Miller talks to relatives of murdered drug users and, in unsettling detail, tells of children as young as five being caught in the savage crossfire.
Sunday Territorian, four stars

This book lays it all out in shocking colour.
The Saturday Paper

Duterte Harry deftly guides readers through this warped political landscape to reveal the vulnerability of a tempestuous leader.
Economist

This book is a history, but also a fable in a time of increasing authoritarian populism. It is a great read, crackling with moral outrage.
Weekend Australia

Jonathan Miller, a correspondent for Channel 4 News, paints a shocking portrait in stark language of the man known as ‘Duterte Harry’ after Clint Eastwood’s uncompromising ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan. The most striking aspect of Miller’s detailed biography, which draws on interviews with Duterte’s family and friends, is how proud many Filipinos are of their maligning and murderous chief executive.
Time Literary Supplement

Duterte Harry: Fire and Fury in the Philippines captures the strongman leader in all his contradictions.
Reuters

Jonathan Miller … skilfully weaves in fear, shock and pain, including meeting those on the hit list and those left behind.
Jim Robinson, North and South

[A] deeply reported, vivid foreign correspondent’s account of the man’s rise to power.
John Reed, Financial Times
 
This study of the foul-mouthed ‘gangster’ by a writer who’s lived in the country for yonks is a real eye-opener.
The Sunday Sport

Miller’s is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of Duterte yet, exploring the unique circumstances that moulded the leader’s psyche, his style of leadership and, later in life, his rise to the presidency.
Richard Javad Heydarian, Mekong Review

Miller, a correspondent for Britain’s Channel 4 news, bases his account on extensive reporting, placing the reader up close as Duterte’s manic and macho personality plunges the Philippines into perpetual civil conflict.
Joshua Kurlantzick, Washington Monthly

Galvanized by Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe’s resounding endorsement — ‘undoubtedly the most powerful voice in Asia today’ — and master translator Sora Kim Russell’s exquisite rendition, Hwang’s latest anglophonic import is surely poised for western success.
Terry Hong, Booklist

A powerful examination of capitalism from one of South Korea’s most acclaimed authors … [Hwang] challenges us to look back and reevaluate the cost of modernisation, and see what and whom we have left behind.
The Guardian

Five stars … Readers expecting this novel to develop into a savage take on Seoul slum life will be disappointed … [Hwang Sok-Yong] wants to tell a different story altogether. Familiar Things turns out to be less about simple disposal than movement between different worlds … resonant.
The Daily Telegraph

Hwang Sok-yong is one of South Korea's foremost writers, a powerful voice for society's marginalised, and Sora Kim-Russell's translations never falter.
Deborah Smith, Translator of The Vegetarian

Undoubtedly the most powerful voice in Asia today.
Kenzaburo Oe, Winner of The Nobel Prize for Literature

A vivid depiction of a city too quick to throw away both possessions and people.
Financial Times

Sora Kim-Russell’s translation moves gracefully between gritty, whiffy realism and folk-tale spookiness.
The Economist

Hwang Sok-yong is one of the most read Korean writers in his country, and best known abroad. An activist for democracy and reconciliation with the North, in his books he melds his political fights with the Korean cultural imagination.
Le Monde

In Familiar Things, the great Korean writer embraces the social realities of his country. It is the opposite of the economic miracle that he paints for us here. Beyond simple naturalism, Hwang Sok-yong mixes into the actual, the magic of a popular culture steeped in the spiritual.
Livreshebdo

Hwang Sok-yong is an endearing author. For his perspective on people and things, for the instinctive modesty of his characters as well as his ability to “capture” — to return through fiction — the contemporary history of his country. Even more, to embody it.
La Croix

A great political book, a plea for a country under the boot of a general, a country embroiled in a fierce power struggle, where ideology has been devoured by productivity, where human beings are nothing more than bellies to be filled for the benefit of industrial producers ... Grandma Willow in her dementia rails, “You're despicable! Do you think you live alone here? You men may all disappear, nature will continue to exist!” Let's hope so!
Critiques Libres

Reality, fiction and fantasy mix closely, giving his writing unparalleled power. Hwang Sok-yong’s empathy for his heroes is always accompanied by a fierce rage against the powerful.
Le Monde Diplomatique

While it invokes South Korean history, culture, mythology and folklore, this slim novel is unmistakably universal in its reach, contemporary in its appeal, and packs an emotional punch that reverberates long after reading.
South China Morning Post

Familiar Things is a poignant novel that depicts decay and regeneration … A sense of menace pervades the novel. But the relationship that develops between Bugeye and Baldspot, who he comes to adopt as his younger brother, is heartwarming.
The Big Issue

Familiar Things is both tragic and heartrending.
The Skinny

Hwang’s writing is rich with symbolism, cautionary lessons, and the potential for redemption.
World Literature Day

[A] cautionary tale, both a mirror and a portent for our own world.
Fionn Mallon, Los Angeles Review of Books
 
Familiar Things walks a perfect path between realism and the supernatural.
Annie Smith, A Bookish Type
 
Familiar Things is a fine little novel, showing a crushing, grim reality in which the resilient human spirit and imagination makes do.
M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review

[A] quick read with a gut punch at the end. Folklore meets tragic existence.
Lolly Dandeneau, Edelweiss

An absolute delight.
Sarah-Hope Parmeter, Edelweiss

In the tradition of social realism, Familiar Things reveals aspects of our current throw-away system that are intentionally kept out of sight. But it is not only a Jungle-esque activist exposé. It is also an engaging coming-of-age portrait.
Emma Schneider, Full Stop